{"title":"Books by Vladimir Sorokin","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9780241355114","title":"Day of the Oprichnik","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eHaunting, terrifying and hilarious, The Day of the Oprichnik is a dazzling novel and a fierce critique of life in the New Russia\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMoscow 2028: Andrei Danilovich Komiaga, oprichnik, member of the czar's inner circle of trusted courtiers, rouses himself from a drunken stupor and prepares for another day of debauchery, violence, terror and beauty. In this New Russia, futuristic technology combine with the draconian world of Ivan the Terrible to create a dystopia chillingly akin to reality. Over the twenty-four-hour span of the novel, Komiaga will rape, pillage and torture, in the name of the czar he fears and adores. Shimmering with invention, fierce social commentary and razor-sharp wit, Day of the Oprichnik imagines a near future too disturbing to contemplate and too close to reality to ignore.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43201561034930,"sku":"9780241355114","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780241355114_1f691a4d-7876-4e56-9053-a716c6554e48.jpg?v=1786012727"},{"product_id":"9780241355138","title":"The Blizzard","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA darkly comic dystopian odyssey, from one of Russia's leading contemporary novelists\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGarin, a country doctor, is desperately trying to reach the village of Dolgoye, where a mysterious epidemic is transforming the villagers into zombies. He has with him a vaccine which will prevent the spread of this epidemic, but a terrible blizzard turns his journey into the stuff of nightmare. A trip that should take hours turns into a metaphysical odyssey, in which he encounters strange beasts, apparitions, hallucinations and dangerous fellow men. Trapped in this existential storm, Sorokin's characters fight their way through a landscape that owes as much to Chekhov's 19th-century Russia as it does to near-future, post-apocalyptic literature. Fantastical, comic and richly drawn, The Blizzard at once answers to the canon of Russian writers and makes a fierce statement about life in contemporary Russia.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56228565221749,"sku":"9780241355138","price":10.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780241355138_12b15fd4-831b-4ea7-a0d2-54e5bdd91d47.jpg?v=1786012728"},{"product_id":"9781628975178","title":"Dispatches from the District Committee","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eGrotesque, deconstructive, and absolutely genius, Vladimir Sorokin’s short story collection \u003ci\u003eDispatches from the District Committee\u003c\/i\u003e is a revelatory, offbeat portrait of Soviet life beyond the propaganda and state-sponsored realism.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCelebrated—and censored—for its political satire, literary irreverence, and provocative themes, Sorokin's work has been recognized across the world for its scathing, darkly humorous commentary on political and cultural oppression in the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eDispatches from the District Committee\u003c\/i\u003e brings together stories from Sorokin’s incendiary 1992 collection \u003ci\u003eThe First Subotnik\/My First Working Saturday\u003c\/i\u003e and elsewhere. Skillfully translated by Max Lawton, these stories remain subversive classics, and increasingly relevant in a post-truth information age.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302067024245,"sku":"9781628975178","price":14.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781628975178_ffd7ef64-cbc2-4f7a-9526-632f9816cc4c.jpg?v=1786034231"},{"product_id":"9781628973969","title":"Their Four Hearts","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn many respects, \u003ci\u003eTheir Four Hearts\u003c\/i\u003e is a book of endings and final things. Vladimir Sorokin wrote it in the year the Soviet Union collapsed and then didn't write fiction for ten years after completing it--his next book being the infamous \u003ci\u003eBlue Lard\u003c\/i\u003e, which he wrote in 1998. Without exaggerating too much, one might call it the last book of the Russian twentieth century and \u003ci\u003eBlue Lard\u003c\/i\u003e the first book of the Russian twenty-first century. It is a novel about the failure of the Soviet Union, about its metaphysical designs, and about the violence it produced, but presented as God might see it or Bataille might write it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eTheir Four Hearts\u003c\/i\u003e follows the violent and nonsensical missions carried out by a group of four characters who represent Socialist Realist archetypes: Seryozha, a naive and optimistic young boy; Olga, a dedicated female athlete; Shtaube, a wise old man; and Rebrov, a factory worker and a Stakhanovite embodying Soviet manhood. However, the degradation inflicted upon them is hardly a Socialist Realist trope. Are the acts of violence they carry out a more realistic vision of what the Soviet Union forced its \"heroes\" to live out? A corporealization and desacralization of self-sacrificing acts of Soviet heroism? How the Soviet Union truly looked if you were to strip away the ideological infrastructure? As we see in the long monologues Shtaube performs for his companions--some of which are scatological nonsense and some of which are accurate reproductions of Soviet language--Sorokin is interested in burrowing down to the libidinal impulses that fuel a totalitarian system and forcing the reader to take part in them in a way that isn't entirely devoid of aesthetic pleasure.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs presented alongside Greg Klassen's brilliant charcoal illustrations, which have been compared to the work of Bruno Schulz by Alexander Genis and the work of Ralph Steadman as filtered through Francis Bacon by several gallerists, this angular work of fiction becomes a scatological storybook-world that the reader is dared to immerse themselves in.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56302247051637,"sku":"9781628973969","price":15.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781628973969_3cee1763-25a6-421a-a60b-6f141682a2b1.jpg?v=1786023613"},{"product_id":"9781681376332","title":"Telluria","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn the warring, neo-feudal society of this cross-genre novel for fans of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson, the greatest treasure is a dose of tellurium—a magical drug administered by a spike through the brain.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eTelluria\u003c\/i\u003e is set in the future, when a devastating holy war between Europe and Islam has succeeded in returning the world to the torpor and disorganization of the Middle Ages. Europe, China, and Russia have all broken up. The people of the world now live in an array of little nations that are like puzzle pieces, each cultivating its own ideology or identity, a neo-feudal world of fads and feuds, in which no one power dominates. What does, however, travel everywhere is the appetite for the special substance tellurium. A spike of tellurium, driven into the brain by an expert hand, offers a transforming experience of bliss; incorrectly administered, it means death.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fifty chapters of \u003ci\u003eTelluria\u003c\/i\u003e map out this brave new world from fifty different angles, as Vladimir Sorokin, always a virtuoso of the word, introduces us to, among many other figures, partisans and princes, peasants and party leaders, a new Knights Templar, a harem of phalluses, and a dog-headed poet and philosopher who feasts on carrion from the battlefield. The book is an immense and sumptuous tapestry of the word, carnivalesque and cruel, and Max Lawton, Sorokin’s gifted translator, has captured it in an English that carries the charge of Cormac McCarthy and William Gibson.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303293530485,"sku":"9781681376332","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681376332_61d27733-52ca-48d2-9035-1438319e9891.jpg?v=1786024559"},{"product_id":"9781681378206","title":"Red Pyramid","description":"Extended comic turns like \u003ci\u003eThe Queue\u003c\/i\u003e and relentless, mind-bending, genre-shredding extravaganzas like \u003ci\u003eIce Trilogy \u003c\/i\u003ehave established Vladimir Sorokin as a master of the contemporary novel. It is to Sorokin’s short fiction, however, that readers must turn to encounter the wildest and most unsettling of his inventions and provocations. Sorokin is a virtuoso of parody and pastiche, as well as  a poet of the black sites where the human soul stands exposed to its own incontinent desires, and \u003ci\u003eRed Pyramid\u003c\/i\u003e spans the whole of his career, from his emergence in  the Soviet Union as a member of Moscow’s artistic underground to his late preeminence as an observer and interpreter of the Putin era, with its squalid parade of gruesome folly and unhinged violence. Included here  are queasy tour-de-forces, like the early “Obelisk,” a story as scatological as it is conceptual; the notorious “A Month in Dachau,” which earned Sorokin his sobriquet as the Russian Sade; and profoundly unsettling texts like “Tiny Tim,” where tenderness is inseparable from horror. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSorokin’s stories have appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003en+1\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eHarper’s Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe Baffler\u003c\/i\u003e. This is the first time they have been collected in English.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303422833013,"sku":"9781681378206","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681378206_6cb839d0-0d78-4ca5-a7ca-71626eab0065.jpg?v=1786034050"},{"product_id":"9781681378183","title":"Blue Lard","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe Russian master's most infamous novel, a dystopian fever dream about cloning, alternative histories, and world domination.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBlue Lard \u003c\/i\u003eis an act of desecration. \u003ci\u003eBlue Lard\u003c\/i\u003e is what's left after the towering masterpieces of Russian literature have been blown to smithereens, the most graphic, shocking, controversial, and celebrated book to be published in Russia since the end of Communism. Denounced as an abomination on publication in 1999—a crowd of angry Putin supporters gathered in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater to toss shredded copies of Sorokin’s books into an enormous papier-mâché toilet—this ferocious takedown of Russian greatness has since found its way into the canon of Russian literature itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The book begins in a futuristic laboratory where genetic scientists speak in a dialect of Russian mixed with Chinese. There they work to clone famous Russian writers, who are then made to produce texts in the style of their forebears. The goal of this “script-process” is not the texts themselves but the blue lard that collects in the small of their backs as they write. This substance is to be used to power reactors on the moon—that is, until a sect of devout nationalists breaks in to steal the blue lard, planning to send it back in time to an alternate version of the Soviet Union, one that exists on the margins of a Europe conquered by a long-haired Hitler with the ability to shoot electricity from his hands. What will come of this blue lard? Who will finally make use of its mysterious powers? \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMax Lawton’s translation of \u003ci\u003eBlue Lard, \u003c\/i\u003ethe first into English, captures this key work in all its grotesque, havoc-making, horrifying, visceral intensity.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56303423062389,"sku":"9781681378183","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781681378183_f31943dc-e360-43d6-89cc-de64dd040724.jpg?v=1786024591"},{"product_id":"9781628975789","title":"The Sugar Kremlin","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePresenting a wide variety of genres and tones, \u003ci\u003eThe Sugar Kremlin\u003c\/i\u003e lays out a frightening vision of speculative mercilessness and carnivalesque political horror.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Sugar Kremlin\u003c\/i\u003e is the follow-up to Vladimir Sorokin’s \u003ci\u003eDay of the Oprichnik\u003c\/i\u003e, taking place in the same New Medieval universe over the course of fifteen chapters that all return to the object of the title: replicas of the Moscow Kremlin made of sugar. Thousands of these creations are given away to children during the holidays, then make their way through each stratum of Russian society. We follow the trajectories of these candied gifts from the hands of harried paupers to secret political dissidents, from torture-obsessed civil servants to sex workers in a nearby bordello...\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs Sorokin shifts from story to story and style to style, he draws the reader through grotesquely Russian scenes, creating an aberrantly metaphysical encyclopedia of the New Medieval \"Russian soul.\" The candy's sweetness is deceptive—underneath it, you may detect notes of blood.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56368094249333,"sku":"9781628975789","price":21.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781628975789_eae037e7-32f1-4862-8bfa-9345f29e7bc6.jpg?v=1786023646"},{"product_id":"ice-trilogy","title":"Ice Trilogy","description":"\u003cp\u003eA New York Review Books Original\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In 1908, deep in Siberia, it fell to earth. THEIR ICE. A young man on a scientific expedition found it. It spoke to his heart, and his heart named him Bro. Bro felt the Ice. Bro knew its purpose. To bring together the 23,000 blond, blue-eyed Brothers and Sisters of the Light who were scattered on earth. To wake their sleeping hearts. To return to the Light. To destroy this world. And secretly, throughout the twentieth century and up to our own day, the Children of the Light have pursued their beloved goal.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Pulp fiction, science fiction, New Ageism, pornography, video-game mayhem, old-time Communist propaganda, and rampant commercial hype all collide, splinter, and splatter in Vladimir Sorokin’s virtuosic Ice Trilogy, a crazed joyride through modern times with the promise of a truly spectacular crash at the end. And the reader, as eager for the redemptive fix of a good story as the Children are for the Primordial Light, has no choice except to go along, caught up in a brilliant illusion from which only illusion escapes intact.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57484399772021,"sku":"9781590173862","price":27.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781590173862.jpg?v=1786266492"},{"product_id":"the-queue","title":"The Queue","description":"\u003cp\u003eVladimir Sorokin’s first published novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Queue\u003c\/i\u003e, is a sly comedy about the late Soviet “years of stagnation.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThousands of citizens are in line for . . . nobody knows quite what, but the rumors are flying.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLeather or suede? Jackets, jeans? Turkish, Swedish, maybe even American? It doesn’t matter–if anything is on sale, you better line up to buy it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSorokin’s tour de force of ventriloquism and formal daring tells the whole story in snatches of unattributed dialogue, adding up to nothing less than the real voice of the people, overheard on the street as they joke and curse, fall in and out of love, slurp down ice cream or vodka, fill out crossword puzzles, even go to sleep and line up again in the morning as the queue drags on.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492356432245,"sku":"9781590172742","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781590172742.jpg?v=1786529194"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-vladimir-sorokin.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}